That language question

The issues of language come up in many conversations here in Kazakhstan and that is not surprising of course given the historical context of the area. Officially, there has been a concerted effort by the government to both promote the language and to increase the number of people speaking it. Kazakh is the official language of the country which means that all of the government and every legal document has to be in Kazakh. Talking about kazakh language in general and kazakh language on the Internet generates different reactions. Where the official line was that kazakh language kaznet is developing and although there are few kazakh-only resources yet, they are increasing in number and range of offerings. The less official line is that while the Internet offers a way to provide learning materials in Kazakh and a space for self-expression of national identity, very little actual kazakh content is online and the leading companies, such as Yandex for example, are not yet providing morphological search and the main Russian-language social network sites such as vkontakte and odnoklassniki have not yet been translated into Kazakh. Google and Facebook on the other hand are available in Kazakh and this means quite a lot to the young kazakh-speakers.

These kinds of pronouncements make sense, although why kazakh youth would prefer for example to use Wordpress instead of KZ's own Yvision has fewer and weaker explanations (based on several Google searches, it is certainly evident that Yvision gets indexed just as well as Wordpress). In the course of subsequent conversations it becomes clear that in fact Yandex provides morphological search in Kazakh as well and their search quality may even rival Google's and odnoklassniki and moimir are translated in Kazakh as well. These changes are recent however.

Amid the confusion it is hard to say what role Kazakh language, nationalist leanings or post-colonial sentiments might play in the kinds of resources produced, available and utilized on Kaznet. Kazakh has a somewhat tortured history as a language - stunted in its development for 70 years because of the Soviet policies, it remained the language of villages and remote areas where modern life rarely made its presence known. The Kazakh spoken in larger cities was augmented by Russian words to add the vocabulary of modern life. Such english-based words as 'airport' and even more common words such as 'coat' made its way into Kazakh language in Russian, sometimes with Kazakh endings. Since the nationalization and Kazakh becoming an official language, many such words have been converted to Kazakh words that seem to appear somehow out of nowhere. This of course continues to create problems as government and technical documents need to be translated into Kazakh that not only does not have the vocabulary, but where there is a strong movement to ensure non-Kazakh words do not become the standard. This is not a new policy, the Quebecois for example have a system that they use in order to preserve their version of French without untoward influences. The problem in this context is that there is no real system so documents translated and written by one person then become unreadable by someone else because there was never an official process or even a record of created words. How much of this story is true and how much is something made up to deal with the general madness of the Kazakh government I do not know, but the language issues seem to be cloaked in a number of stories that in some ways devalue the language itself and make it seem impossible for the language to become usable any time soon.

Yet examples of language policy and language development failure abound regardless of the ethnic background of my interviewees and interlocutors. There are many language learning systems (one of them was handed to me as a present the other day) which cost a lot and the production value is relatively low. There have been ideas to create integrated language learning systems online with existing physical language learning systems for sale, but none of these ideas have generated much traction despite the funding for these ideas being available. Kaznet is empty because there is so little local content produced in both languages - Russian and Kazakh and also because the kinds of language, ethnic and national identity issues as well as post-colonial tensions are evidenced not only in the patterns of use but also in the patterns of financial support and technical development here in Kazakhstan.